The Internet allows information to be passed back and forth between parties with the push of a button. This information can travel great distances at incredible speeds over a massive public network, such as the World Wide Web. But that capability has caused problems to arise regarding the security of such information, and in particular, the security of personally identifiable information (PII). For example, enterprising hackers can obtain PII as it passes over a public network. To help prevent this, many communications are encrypted.
Hackers may also attempt to obtain PII by spoofing a website to make it look like the website belongs to a legitimate entity. For example, a website can be made to mimic a legitimate e-commerce website. When an unsuspecting Internet user happens on the site, they may think that it is a legitimate website. When the user wants to purchase something using the site, they may be required to enter PII, such as a username, password, name, address, and/or credit card information, into the spoofed website, which is in turn sent to the hackers.
Some websites, such as those corresponding to financial institutions, have derived a way for users to verify that a website is legitimate. For example, when a user wants to access their account, they may be required to enter their account number and/or username on the website. The website may then display an image or phrase that the user has set up beforehand with the website. If the image or phrase matches the one that was set up earlier, the user knows that the website is legitimate. Otherwise, the user knows that they are on a spoofed website.
While this approach provides a certain level of security, it also has some shortcomings. For example, even though users can identify spoofed websites using this approach, they must send their account number and/or username to the website to do so. So while users will know that a spoofed website is not valid, hackers may already have some of their PII (e.g., the users' account number and/or username sent during the set-up phase). Another shortcoming is that when users first set up the image or phrase, they may not know if they are communicating with a legitimate website. They may be setting everything up on a spoofed website, allowing hackers to receive more PII.
Another shortcoming is that this approach is limited. For it to work, the user must set it up beforehand with the specific website. So this approach is generally only used with websites that a user accesses regularly, like a bank. It may be just too cumbersome for users to set everything up beforehand on other websites. For example, if a user wanted to make a purchase from an e-commerce website he has never visited before, the user would have to set up his security information with the website before he could make the purchase, and he would have no way of knowing if the website was legitimate.
In addition, conventional point-of-sale (POS) systems for processing payments and other digital transactions are often associated with various problems. For example, conventional POS systems may raise concerns about both information security and transaction efficiency. From a security standpoint, conventional POS systems also often transmit personally identifiable information as part of the transaction. For example, at a grocery store, a customer purchasing groceries may pay for the groceries with a credit card, which may reveal personally identifying information of the customer to the grocery store and may similarly expose the customer to a variety of threats, such as dishonest sales clerks, credit card skimming devices, and security breaches.
Similarly, conventional systems for processing payments and other digital transactions may introduce concerns about efficiency due to the length and complexity of the corresponding payment ecosystem. For example, a conventional credit card authentication process may trace a route from a buyer to a gateway, to a bank, to a network, back to the bank, back to the network, back to the bank, back to the gateway, and finally to a merchant. Unfortunately, this complexity may both slow down transaction processing time and increase the number of security vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for improved systems and methods capable of securing electronic data exchanges.